Outline
The Greatest Commands
- Mark 12:28–34
- This scribe desires to be close to the kingdom, and Jesus says that he is by loving God and loving his neighbor.
Loving God (Deut 6:4–9)
- Context: The issue at stake is not Israel following another God instead of YHWH but following YHWH alongside the gods of their surrounding nations.
- Note how often Israel is to include the “poor and needy” (see 15:11; 24:14), which in Deuteronomy specifically takes the form of “the alien, the fatherless and the widow.” – loving neighbor
- The temptation to forget the law
- “Hear” – to listen, heed, obey, follow
- “The Lord alone”/“The Lord is one”
- God and his kingdom is the one and only God and kingdom that should be followed.
- The importance of continuing to teach the law to future generations.
Loving Neighbor (Lev 19; Luke 10:29–37)
- “You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy.”
- Parable of the Good Samaritan
- Political retelling
Application
- Reject Christian Nationalism
- There is nothing wrong with caring about the state and future of our nation.
- We cannot place our concern for our nation alongside God and the kingdom of God (the LORD is one).
- Where is our hope?
- How do we spread the kingdom and kingdom values?
- Whose job is it to produce Christians?
- How do we relate to power?
- Are we just as willing to pray, “God bless Iraq” or “God bless Russia,” as we are to pray, “God bless America?”
- Stand for God’s Design
- Pledging allegiance to God’s kingdom means we stand up for what is right and speak out against that which is evil.
- Bottom-up versus top-down approach
- Vote for Our Neighbor
- The primary way we love our neighbor in the political arena is when we choose to engage in politics (e.g., voting, supporting a candidate or piece of legislation, etc.) we do so to benefit other people, not ourselves. Too often we engage in politics to make life easier for ourselves, this is not loving our neighbor.
- Particularly, Scripture and Jesus would say we do so with a primary concern for the poor, outcast, and disadvantaged.
- Respect Differing Opinions
- No two people are going to completely agree on how to love God and love our neighbor in the political arena.
- Do we love the poor through a government program or lowering of taxes? There are arguments to be made on both sides.
Watch the Entire Series
Transcript
The primary way we love our neighbor in the political arena, I believe, is when we choose to engage in politics, whatever that may look like, voting as supporting a particular candidate, supporting a particular piece of legislation, whatever it looks like the primary way we love our neighbor in the political arena is when we choose to engage in politics, in whatever form that takes.
We do so to benefit other people, not ourselves. Too often we engage in politics to make life easier for ourselves, which is not loving our neighbor.
Welcome to the Thinking Theologically podcast, where we teach you how and why you should think theologically. I am your host, Spencer Shaw, and this is the final episode in our series on politics throughout the month of October. As we have been preparing for the election, we have been thinking theologically about politics. The goal of this series has been to create a theology that can aid us as Christians in the way, not just that we think about politics, but the way that we approach and engage politics, that we think and act in the political sphere in a way that represents who we are as believers in God and Scripture, and most importantly, as followers of Jesus.
We want to engage politics in the way that Jesus did. And so throughout this series, we have not been addressing what I call the three P’s people, policies, and parties. The goal throughout the series has not been so much application, though. In our. In my interview with Jake Go Browns, we dived in a little bit to the implications and the application of this theology that we’ve been laying out throughout the series, but it’s been more focused on creating that theology, a way to think in the way of God, in the way of Jesus about politics.
Jack began our series by talking about engaging the powers that are. Battle is not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, powers, and authorities in the heavenly realm. That what sits behind all of the evil and the brokenness in this world are spiritual forces. And so we both think that if we spend all of our time battling flesh and blood, engaging in human endeavors, and not in spiritual endeavors, then Paul would say that we’re wasting our time, that the true enemy are the principalities, powers, and authorities.
That moved on to our second lesson, where I discussed what happens when our battle against these principalities and powers moves to the political stage. What happens when we believe that there’s evil that’s present in the world, that is a result of the principalities and powers that God has called us to speak out against this evil and brokenness, to do something to fix it.
But this evil has become a part of political policies and agendas, and it is the platform on which candidates are running in those scenarios, what we as Christians to do, and the way I went about answering that question was, I went back and I said, let’s look at how the early church dealt with some of these issues, because the early church dealt with a lot of the same kind of issues and evil and brokenness that we’re continuing to deal with today.
And they dealt with that in a very specific way. They did a bottom up approach rather than a top down, rather than trying to gain power and influence the people in power and change laws and rules and regulations with the early church did as they began from the bottom, they simply lived as the church in the power of the spirit.
They transformed the spaces and places in which they lived in a to many glimpses of heaven, and as a result, they ended up changing the world. And so I argue that we as Christians today should learn something from the early church, that we should engage in politics and in the evil in our world from a bottom up approach that we simply live as the church in the power of the spirit.
Now, ultimately, in doing that, at some point when we want to live out the gospel, particularly when we want to stand on the side of people that are harmed and oppressed, the poor and the vulnerable, that our backs are going to be pushed up against the political wall, and we’re going to realize that certain politicians, that certain policies and legislations and laws are harming people, and we might at some point have to get political and stand against these political powers that are harming people.
But I argued that the place that we begin is not there. We don’t begin with politics. We don’t begin with power. We begin by living out the gospel, by being the church in the power of the spirit. And then we move on from there. It’s not that we don’t ever get political. It’s not that we don’t ever recognize that that political powers do harm people and can do good things, but a lot of the times do very bad things.
It’s none of those things. It’s simply that that’s not the place that we begin. That then led Jack to our third discussion, where he talked about, well, then what is the role of government and God’s institution of government, the way that God uses governments, even when governments are evil and corrupt. And that now leads us to our final discussion in this series.
In this episode, we’re going to be talking about loving God and loving our neighbor. This episode is as close as we’re going to get to an application of our theology. And when it comes down to it, the way that we gay engage in politics, however we choose to do that. And I’ve said throughout the series that we as as the church, I think we need to have this bottom up approach.
But not every Christian, and probably not even any two Christians, are going to completely agree on what that looks like. What does it look like to be the church in the power of the spirit? What does it look like to do this bottom up approach in this scenario and with this issue and with the brokenness that that exists over here right now, no two people are going to completely agree on it.
But when it comes down to it, the way that we engage in politics, I think needs to be in a way that goes back to the two greatest commands that we engage in politics in a way that loves God and loves our neighbor. No doubt. I imagine that you’ve heard these two greatest commands to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself.
We find Jesus speaking about these two greatest commandments in all three of the Synoptic Gospels Matthew, Mark, and Luke. But I want to to open up our discussion by reading Mark’s account. Mark chapter 12, beginning in verse 28.
It says that “one of the scribes came near and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that Jesus answered them, well, he asked him, which commandment is the first of all? Jesus answered, the first is here, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength. The second is this you shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these.And the scribe said to him, you are right, teacher. You have truly said that he is one, and besides him there is no other. And to love him with all the heart and with all the understanding, and with all the strength, and to love one’s neighbor as oneself. This is much more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices. When Jesus saw that, he answered wisely, he said to him, you are not far from the kingdom of God. After that, no one dared to ask him any question.”
The scribe comes up to Jesus, and he’s seen that Jesus answered other questions well, and so he thinks that Jesus might have some good and significant information to impart. And so he wants to know what Jesus considers to be the most important law.
And that’s in essence a question of how Jesus reads the law. What is Jesus starting point when he’s reading the law by which he then moves on to all the other commandments? And Jesus says that there’s actually two, that the greatest is to love God. And the second is like it. It’s to love your neighbor as yourself. The scribe replies and says that Jesus is correct.
And then Jesus says, based on the scribes reply that he is not far from the kingdom of God. I’m assuming that you as well as I, we desire not merely to be a part of the kingdom of God, but to live as citizens of the kingdom of God, to desire to spread the kingdom of God throughout the earth.
And so here we get a glimpse of what this kingdom looks like, what it means to live as citizens in this kingdom, what it looks like to spread the kingdom, and that is to love God and to love your neighbor. That’s at the heart, Jesus says of what it means to be a part of God’s kingdom. But something else that’s interesting about this dialog between the scribe and Jesus is that I, part of the scribes response is to say that these two commands to love God and to love your neighbor are greater than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.
That is to say, that in essence, the worship side of Israel’s life, the offerings and sacrifices that they make to God, to honor God and to respect God, but also the sacrifices that they make to forgive sin. All of this worship side of God, the way that Israel interacts with God in the form of worship. The scribe says, all of that’s important, all that Israel is to do, but it’s not as important as loving God and loving your neighbor.
And Jesus says that that part of the scribes response to is what makes him close to the kingdom. In other words, you and I can worship. We can study our Bibles, we can pray. We can come to church every time the doors are open. And that’s great. That’s good. That’s something we ought to be doing. That’s how we grow in our relationship with God.
But it’s not as important. It’s not as central to what it means to be a part of the kingdom as loving God and loving your neighbor. Yes, part of loving God is going to be worshiping him and spending time speaking to him in prayer and all of those kinds of things. But those are a results of something that is deeper and more core to what it means to be a part of the kingdom, to love God and to love your neighbor.
The first commandment that Jesus says the greatest to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. There Jesus is quoting from Deuteronomy chapter six. In Deuteronomy chapter six, we have a beginning in verse four, what have become known as the Shama. The Shama gets its name from the first word here.
Shama is the Hebrew word for here, and the Shama here in Deuteronomy six is a prayer that is central to the identity of Israel. It was something that it seems that Israelites and later on Jews regularly prayed, regularly, recited, regularly, taught to their children. Now, obviously we don’t know to what degree all of that took place, but we do know that this is at the core of Israel’s life here.
“O Israel, the Lord is our God. The Lord alone or the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and with all your might. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise, bind them as a sign on your hand. Fix them as an emblem on your forehead and write them on the door posts of your house and on your gates.”
When Moses says these words in the context of the book of Deuteronomy, as well as in the context of Israel’s entire history, the issue at stake here is not Israel following another God instead of Yahweh, but the issue is following Yahweh alongside the gods of their surrounding nations.
If you read Israel’s history, their struggle is not to say, well, we don’t want to worship Yahweh anymore. And so we’re going to go and we’re going to begin to worship and to follow and to pledge allegiance to these other gods, the gods of the nations around them. But Israel’s primary problem is, is to say, we’re going to continue to worship Yahweh, but we’re going to bring these other gods alongside Yahweh.
We’re going to worship these other gods along with Yahweh, the one true God. An example of this if you’ve read through the Old Testament, you might have come across the language of an Asherah pole, and an Asher up pole was the. It was worship to a female goddess. And in the way that a lot of the nations around Israel operated is that you would have a male God, and the male God needed a female counterpart.
So you’ve kind of bring these two gods together, and with the astro pole, that seems to be what Israel was doing. They had Yahweh and they understood Yahweh as their male god, their male deity. And so they needed to bring another god, a female goddess, alongside Yahweh. And so they did that in the form of the Astra pole.
And God gets upset at that for a variety of reasons. Not only are they worshiping another God, but they’re limiting God to needing another deity. They’re understanding God as as masculine. Though God is beyond gender, there’s there’s all kinds of reasons that God gets mad about that. But that’s an illustration of what Israel’s primary problem is, their primary their primary issue is not so much forsaking Yahweh to worship other gods, but it is to bring other gods alongside their worship of Yahweh and when Israel does that, what tends to happen is they tend to end up neglecting other people.
So when they stop loving God like they should, the Lord is one, the Lord alone. That Yahweh is the only one that Israel is to follow. When they stop loving Yahweh as they should, and begin to bring other gods alongside of them, it begins to impact the way that Israel treats people, primarily people who are in need. Now something that’s interesting is if you read through the prophets, these prophets come and they call out Israel partly for their idolatry.
That’s normally what we think. When we think of the prophets, we think of them calling out Israel idolatry and their worship of other gods. And the prophets do do that. However they do that not as much as they call out Israel for neglecting the poor in the widow, in the orphan, the prophets are much more concerned with the justice that exists in Israel, the way they are treating the poor in the widow and the orphan.
They’re a little more concerned with that than they are about Israel following these other gods. So they’re concerned about that as well. And they’re following other. God seems to be connected with the lack of justice in the land. You also see that in the book of of Deuteronomy. If you have some time, I would encourage you to read through Deuteronomy and note how often Israel is to include the poor and the needy, which in Deuteronomy specifically refers to the alien, the fatherless, and the widow.
In other words, not only does Israel’s failure to love God lead to their failure to love others, their failure to enact mercy and justice, the their failure to care for the poor, the widow, the orphan, the stranger. But in Deuteronomy, the context, it’s positive. It’s these are the things you were supposed to continue to do. And so in Deuteronomy, we see the reverse is true as well, that to love God means to love your neighbor.
It means to care for the poor and the needy, the alien, the fatherless, and the widow. And so a lot of what takes place in in Deuteronomy is to remind Israel about their identity, about who they are. And at the core are people who love God. They don’t bring other gods alongside God. But to do that is to love your neighbor.
There’s a couple of other things that I want to point out just about the A text here. That kind of helps to get the fullest understanding of the Shama here in Deuteronomy six, I mentioned that the name Shama comes from the first word here in Israelite thought to hear it. It’s not just an auditory process. It’s not just to.
Someone speaks and and I hear what they say, but it’s to listen. It’s to okay. It’s to heed, it’s to obey. It’s to follow. So to hear these words of Moses is to obey them and to follow them. Hero Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord alone, or the Lord is one. That is to say that God and God’s kingdom is the one.
It’s the. He’s the only God. It’s the only kingdom that they should follow. They should not be as Israel will go on to do, to chase these other gods and try to bring them alongside the one true God. And then that moves into the language of talking about these in your home, reciting them to your children, binding them on your hands and on your foreheads and on your doorpost, which later Jews actually do.
Bind these words to their foreheads and to their doorpost. This shows the importance of continuing to teach future generations. If Israel wants to be the people of God, if Israel wants to embody what it means to love God, then they must continue to not only love God, but also to love their neighbor. And so we see Jesus bring these two commands together when he’s asked, what is the greatest commandment in the law?
So the first response that Jesus has is to say that the greatest commandment is to love God. The second one is to love your neighbor as yourself. And when Jesus says this, he’s quoting from Leviticus 19, and I want to spend a moment and highlight a couple of things that are taking place here in Leviticus chapter 19, the this is how Leviticus 19 opens in verse two.
“You shall be holy, for I, the Lord, your God, am holy.”
For something to be holy means literally that something is is set apart. And generally the idea is it’s set apart for a purpose. So let’s say that you have a bunch of chairs and you need to reserve a certain number of chairs for an event. So you set them aside for a specific purpose for these event.
For this event, they can’t be used for anything else. You could call those chairs holy that they’re set apart for a purpose. And so here we’re told that God is holy. He is different. He is set apart, particularly from other gods. There is no one like God. God is different. God is set apart. God is greater. And that’s connected to the idea of why Israel is to worship and to follow and to love God and love God alone.
Love only God because God is different and he is holy. But here we see that because God is holy, those who follow God are also to behold. A you are to be holy as I, the Lord your God and holy since I am holy, God says you that follow me also need to be holy. You need to be different.
You need to be set apart, particularly from the other people in the world. And in the context of Israel. Israel is to be holy. They are to be different. They are to set up, be set apart from all of the other nations of the world. And so the rest of the video is 19 here lays out what it means for Israel to be holy as God is holy, what does that look like?
And one of the things that it looks like is it looks like loving your neighbor as yourself. Viscous 19 verse 18. This is where Jesus is quoting when he’s asked about the greatest commandments.
“You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.”
And want you to notice something about this statement. It says that they are not to bear a grudge against any of your people, against any of your fellow Israelites, but rather love your neighbor as yourself. That is, they are to love their fellow Israelite as themselves, not to hold a grudge against them. And so the immediate context of love your neighbor as yourself is not all people, right?
It’s just your fellow Israelites how his Israel supposed to interact with their fellow Israelites. Well, they aren’t to take vengeance against them. They’re not to bear a grudge against them, but they are to love them as they love themselves. However, by the time we get to the end of Leviticus 19, this statement to love your fellow Israelite as yourself is expanded to include all people.
And so when we skip down to verse 33, “When an alien, a sojourner, an outsider rider resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the outsider. The outsider who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you. You shall love the outsider as yourself. For you were aliens in the land of Egypt. I am the Lord your God.”
So the first context of love your neighbor as yourself is just your fellow Israelite. But then it says that when a stranger, when an outsider, comes into the land of Israel, someone who’s not an Israelite, you don’t oppress that outsider. You don’t treat them poorly. You look at them as if they were a fellow Israelite. You treat them as you would treat an Israelite.
Which, how are you to treat an Israelite? You were to love them as you love yourself. And so if you treat the outsider like you treat the Israelite, then you also love the outsider as you love yourselves. So by the time you get to the end of Leviticus 19, this concept is expanded to all people that Israel is to love all people as they love themselves.
This is illustrated in Luke’s version of the two greatest commands in the Gospel of Luke. After Jesus gives the two greatest commands, he’s asked, well, who is my neighbor? In other words, who am I required to love? And if you remember, Jesus responds by telling the parable of the Good Samaritan, you have this man. I think we’re meant to assume that this man is a Jew.
He gets, mugged and left on the side of the road. And these Jewish elite, Jewish religious people, a priest, a Levite. These are the people who walk past this man on the side of the road. They look at him and they do nothing to help the person who stops and helps as a Samaritan, half Jew, half Gentile.
And for the Jews to be half Jew and have Gentile is worse than just being a Gentile. There’s all kinds of of written things that we have from around the time of Jesus that shows just how much at least some Jews hated Samaritans. And so you could almost think of the Samaritan as the enemy, as the abomination for the Jews.
And yet only the Samaritan is the one who stops and helps the man, takes him to an end, make sure he gets what he needs and pays for it. I’ve. I’ve talked about the parable of the Good Samaritan in sermons before and around political times of the year. I like to give a little bit of a, political retelling of the parable of the Good Samaritan, a version that maybe Jesus in today’s, climate maybe would have told the story a little bit more.
Something like this. There’s a man driving down the road on the back of his vehicle. He has a bumper sticker that says, Make America Great Again. As he’s driving, his iPhone buzzes. He looks down at it to see who it is and when he looks up, there’s a dog in the middle of the road. The man swerves in order to miss the dog, but loses control of the vehicle and finds himself in a ditch.
When the car hits in the ditch, the man’s head snaps forward, hitting the steering wheel, knocking him unconscious, and there the man lays the side of the road as smoke billows up into the air. A few minutes pass and another vehicle begins coming down the road. On the back of this vehicle, it says, proud follower of Jesus. The man in this car drives up.
He sees this man and his vehicle in the ditch and he slows down and looks. But he’s got things to do. And so he drives past. A few minutes later, a another a car starts driving down the road. This a woman driving the car on, on the back. She has a one of those little emblems for her church, her church of Christ, her her Baptist church.
Wherever she goes, she has the name of her church on the back. She proudly supports the church that she goes to. And as she approaches, she slows down as well. But she’s already got plans. She’s got to get up to church and get set up for their VBS, and she doesn’t have time to stop. And so she drives past.
Finally. A third vehicle begins driving down the road. The woman driving this car also has a Make America Great Again bumper sticker, part of of the same, political party supporting the same political candidate as this man in the ditch. She slows down but drives past. Finally, a few more minutes passed by. And.
Another car begins driving down the road. This man has a bumper sticker that says Christians for Kamala.
And I stand with her. This man approaches the red. He slows down, but he doesn’t drive past. He gets out of his vehicle. He goes and helps the the man who’s been in the crash. She takes him out, puts him in the back of his own vehicle, drives him to the local hospital and pays for all of the medical bills that it takes to bring this man back to health.
Which one of these do you suppose proved to be a neighbor to the man who’s in the wreck? Jesus says that to be close to the kingdom of God means that we love God. But loving God means that we love our neighbor, particularly the poor and the needy. The widow, the outsider, the stranger. And that goes for all people, regardless of who they are, what they believe, what candidate they support.
We are to love all people. I want to close now with a little bit of application. What does this look like? What does it look like to follow Jesus? To live as citizens of the Kingdom of God, to love God and to love our neighbor? When it comes to politics, how can we as Christians engage in the political sphere in a way that loves God and loves our neighbor?
I’ve got four things here that I want to mention. The first thing that I think it means is that we reject Christian nationalism, and I know I might get a lot of pushback for saying that, but it is absolutely, positively true. We must reject Christian nationalism. Now, what do I mean by Christian nationalism? Because the problem is when a people on social media or on the news talk about Christian nationalism, everybody, it seems to me, is defining it differently.
It means one thing to one person and another thing to another person. And so stick with me and let me define what I mean. The first thing that I want to say is there is nothing wrong with caring about the state in the future of our nation. And so my Christian nationalism, I’m not talking about Christians who care about what’s going on in our country, who want to change things that are going on in our country, who care about the future of our country.
That’s not what I’m saying. This is what I mean when I say reject Christian nationalism. I’m saying that we cannot place our concern for our nation alongside God and the kingdom of God, because the Lord is one. Like Israel’s temptation was not to forsake their worship of Yahweh, to worship all of these other gods instead, but to bring these other gods alongside Yahweh.
I think that’s our biggest temptation as Christians today. It’s not to worship the nation instead of God. That that’s not what I mean when I talk about Christian nationalism, though some people use it in that way, and I don’t think that’s the problem. And the a temptation that we as Christians can sometimes have. I think the temptation is to worship God and the nation, to pledge allegiance equally to God and to our nation, to care equally about the future of the kingdom of God and the future of our nation.
And that would be idolatry. To bring something alongside God, to put something on the same level as God, to care about something in the same way that we care about God. Again, I want to make sure I’m clear. I’m not saying it’s wrong to care about our nation and the future of our country. I am saying it is wrong to care about the nation and the future of our country just as much as we care about God and His kingdom and the spreading of the Kingdom of God.
And I think that tends to be our temptation. Just like Israel, is to bring the nation alongside God and to, in essence, end up worshiping both, which is why Israel needs to be reminded, and they are to continue to remind future generations that the Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength.
So how do we know whether or not we’ve done that? How do we know if our concern for our nation has become an idol? If we have brought our concern and care for our nation alongside our concern and care for God and for the kingdom of God, well, here’s a couple of questions that I would encourage you to ask yourself.
Where’s your hope? Your hope for the future? Your hope for the world to change that the hope for justice? Is it placed in a political for a party? Certain legislation this country or in the Kingdom of God, in the power of the Holy Spirit? How do you believe we are to spread the kingdom and kingdom values? Do we spread the kingdom and kingdom values through law and legislation?
Do we legislate people into the Kingdom, or do we allow the Holy Spirit to convict the world? Do we allow the Holy Spirit to transform us and to use us as people that are able to spread the light of the kingdom into the spaces and places in which we live?
Whose job is it to produce Christians? Is it the job of our schools? Is it the job of our state? Or is it the job of the church? How do you relate to power? Do you desire power? Do you desire for the church and for Christians to have power to force our agenda, to force our morality, to force our justice, to force our way of life?
Or do you relate to power in the way of Jesus? Jesus told his disciples at the Last Supper in the Gospel of Luke that the Gentiles lord power over people that the rest of the world desires power to force what they want, to force their way of life. And Jesus says, it should not be so among you, but the greatest among you must become the least, must become a servant of all in the kingdom of God.
We don’t desire power. We desire to serve. The final question are we just as willing to pray? God bless Iraq or God bless Russia as we are to pray. God bless America. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with praying that God will bless our country and our leaders. We’re told to pray for our leaders, but there are other countries. There are other nations.
There are other people throughout the world who are created in the image of God. Are we just as willing to pray for them and for their country and for their leaders and for their way of life as we are for ours? So first, I think that loving God and loving our neighbor when it comes to politics means that we reject Christian nationalism.
Secondly, I think it means that we stand for God’s design. Pledging allegiance to God’s kingdom means we stand up for what is right and speak out against that which is evil. And so that’s something that I want to say about this kind of bottom up approach of simply living as the church. It doesn’t mean that we just sit around and we allow evil and brokenness to continue to take place and say, oh, well, I can’t get involved in that.
I just have to live my life. That’s not what I’m saying. Pledging our allegiance to the kingdom of God, loving God and loving our neighbor means that we stand up for what is right. We speak out against that which is evil, but we do so with a bottom up approach. We don’t try to do it first and foremost.
By taking power, but we do so by living out the light of the gospel and of the kingdom, in the spaces and places in which we already live. And we move out from there. But it doesn’t mean that we stand up for God’s design.
Third, it means that we vote for our neighbor. We’ve talked about before that as Christians try to understand what it means to have this bottom up approach, how we are to engage in politics as followers of Jesus in a theological manner, in this context, to love God and love our neighbor.
We’re going to see things different that for some people, they’re going to believe that the best way to do it is to vote for this party. Some people are going to believe it’s to vote for the other party. Other people are going to believe it’s not to vote at all. And we need to respect the decisions of others as long as they are putting the kingdom first.
And we’ve talked about that in previous episodes. But when we do vote, when we do choose to use the right that we have to vote, we do it for our neighbor.
The primary way we love our neighbor in the political arena, I believe, is when we choose to engage in politics, whatever that may look like, voting as supporting a particular candidate, supporting a particular piece of legislation, whatever it looks like the primary way we love our neighbor in the political arena is when we choose to engage in politics, in whatever form that takes.
We do so to benefit other people, not ourselves. Too often we engage in politics to make life easier for ourselves, which is not loving our neighbor.
One thing that personally drives me crazy about Christians is when we talk about politics, when we talk about voting, when we talk about a candidate, we always talk about, well, this candidate is going to make life so much easier for me.
And I’m sitting there wondering, where in the Bible does it say that our primary concern should be ourselves? Not that you shouldn’t be concerned for yourself or for your family, for your children, for any of those things. You do need to be concerned about that. You do need to take care of your family. But the Bible is very specific that our first concern is for other people, and particularly throughout Scripture, but particularly Jesus would say we do so with a primary concern for the poor and the outcast and the disadvantaged.
And so we engage in politics. We vote not first to help us, but to help others, and specifically to help the poor and the outcast and the needy and the disadvantaged. When’s the last time you said, I’m voting for this candidate, or I’m supporting this piece of legislation because it best helps the poor. It best helps the needy.
It best helps the outcast. It best helps the oppressed. That’s how Jesus would say we engage not just in politics, but that’s what it looks like to love our neighbor. That’s what it looks like to love God. That was Israel’s problem is when they brought other gods alongside God, justice went out the window. And the same thing happens to us when we bring our nation alongside Jesus.
We start caring first for ourselves, and we stop caring about other people, particularly the poor and the oppressed. And so to love our neighbor means that when we engage in politics, we do so with a primary concern for the poor and the oppressed and the disadvantaged.
And fourth, and finally, it means we respect differing opinions. No two people are going to completely agree on how to love God and love our neighbor in the political arena.
For example, do we love the poor through this government program or do we love the poor by lowering taxes? And I’m just going to be honest with you, there’s an argument that could be made on both sides of a question like that. And so no two Christians are going to completely agree about what it looks like to love God and love your neighbor in a political in the political arena, what it looks like to put the poor and the oppressed first.
And so we need to respect other people’s opinions. But again, I would say as long as we’re putting the kingdom first, as long as we’re putting other people first, as long as we’re putting the poor and the oppressed first, we need to respect other people’s opinions that they see the way that we do that differently than the way that we see it.
And that’s fine. We can have civil discussions about those things where I would say, maybe we need to draw a line is when we’ve stopped putting the kingdom first, when, like Israel, we’ve brought the idol of the nation beside our following of the kingdom. Or when we become selfish, when we’ve become prideful, when we’ve stopped caring for other people, when we have stopped caring primarily for the poor and the oppressed, and we’ve started caring only for ourselves at those times, we might need to speak up.
But this is my encouragement. When it comes down to it. As citizens of the Kingdom of God, as followers of Jesus, the ways we engage in politics. First, we begin from the bottom up. Our battle is not against flesh and blood. It’s against the principalities, powers, and authorities. And so we live in the power of the spirit at some point.
At some point, we’re going to have to engage in one way or another in politics, because there are candidates, there are legislations, there are things that are hurt the poor and the oppressed. But we do so first from the bottom up, not getting drunk with power. And we do so in a way that loves God and loves our neighbor as ourselves.
That puts other people that puts the poor and the oppressed first. That’s how we engage in politics as followers of Jesus.
Thank you for tuning in to this episode as we finish out our series on thinking theologically about politics. You can find all of the episodes on of this series on our website, thinkingtheologically.org, as well as a bunch of other content.
Even some additional content about politics will be on there. You can find me or thinking theologically on all social media platforms, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok. You can also find this video and all of our other videos on our YouTube page. Wherever you find us, I would encourage you to like our page and subscribe to us. If you’re on our website, you can even subscribe to our new quarterly newsletter, Will We, where we will provide you with new, information about the things that we are putting out.
But that’s the episode. Thank you for joining us.
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